Getting back to telling all the conference stories. The first keynote on Thursday was “Postgres Battles NoSQL Hype and Future Challenges” by Bruce Momjian. I am sure many of my friends attended one of the previous Bruce’s presentation of this talk. However, this particular presentation was very important for me.

Here is why. Postgres is becoming increasingly popular in different industries. I remember that when I made my big decision to switch from Oracle to Postgres five years ago, I was very scared to get behind in Oracle was thinking about taking certification courses in between, and most importantly – could not even imagine this change will be semi-permanent. I thought of it as a short stop in my long-term relationships with Oracle. I remember at that time when people were hiring nobody even expected the candidates to have any Postgres experience.

Now – how much did it change in the past five years! Nevertheless, I could not agree more with what Boris was saying when he opened the Thursday morning session: the database research world and the Postgres world are still two different galaxies. I am not going to retell the whole story here, but let me say this: I am very happy and very proud that my efforts in “making this happened” resulted in Bruce presenting at the ICDE!

I think this keynote was very well received, and I sincerely hope that we are entering a new era in relationships of Postgres with the rest of the world :).

I’ve mentioned multiple times in this blog and on many other occasions: I believe that Postgres optimizer is the best optimizer at this time. And that the fact which we all hate about it – the absence of optimizer hints – actually serves it well. Bruce is always saying that I am asking him the most difficult questions, but this time around I had nothing to report! And not because I am not doing any programming :), but because I didn’t run into any optimizer failures recently. And to Bruce’s last slide – what the academic community can do – I would agree wholeheartedly, that we can join the efforts to make Postgres optimizer even better!

And for those folks who still didn’t get a chance to listen to this presentation – here are the slides. Enjoy 🙂